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Shingon Buddhism

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school of Buddhism in Japan

~40 min read

Encyclopedic overview

Danjō garan of Kongōbu-ji, the head temple of the Kōyasan sect based in Mount Kōya

Shingon (真言宗, Shingon-shū; "True Word/Mantra School") is one of the major schools of Buddhism in Japan and one of the few surviving Vajrayana lineages in East Asian Buddhism. It is a form of Japanese Esoteric Buddhism and is sometimes called "Tōmitsu" (東密 lit. "Esoteric [Buddhism] of Tō-ji"). The word shingon is the Japanese reading of the Chinese word 真言 (zhēnyán), which is the translation of the Sanskrit word mantra.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Shingon Buddhism” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.